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Chapter 32: Truth Has to Wait.but Not to Wait Forever

But I bring Sigmund Freud to analyze Mahavira’s attitude and character - the same facts.

It is strange that there are thousands of madmen in the insane asylums around the world, and there is a certain kind of madness in which nakedness and pulling out the hair happens together. Those mad people live naked and they pull out their hair - they don’t allow anybody to cut their hair or shave their beards. And the same mad people don’t allow themselves to be given showers or baths. Strange! Is Mahavira a madman of the same category? Or are these mad people Mahaviras, great masters misunderstood by an insane world? Somewhere something has to be decided.

Strangely enough, these mad people who live naked, pull out their hair, don’t take any baths, are absolutely non-violent. They are not dangerous; they never hurt anybody, they never kill anybody. They are very harmless people. And that is the whole philosophy of Mahavira: non-violence. Perhaps he was a madman with a genius, with such talented intelligence that he made a philosophical standpoint out of his madness. Now, who is going to decide?

The fact in itself is without any judgment; in itself it says nothing, it is simply a fact. The moment you start thinking about it, you start creating interpretations, and those interpretations will depend on your attitude. They have nothing to do with the fact.

Because I have brought Sigmund Freud in, I cannot allow him to go out so easily. He was the founder of psychoanalysis, and yet he remained a practicing Jew for his whole life, subscribing to all the superstitions of the Jews. For example, circumcision.: Every Jewish male child, as he is born, is immediately circumcised. Mohammedans are also circumcised but after two or three years, not immediately.

And Jews believe that they are the most intelligent people in the world because of circumcision. It is true that they are perhaps the most intelligent group of people in the world. The whole contemporary world is dominated by Jews: Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein. These three figures stand out amongst billions of people. Their contribution to human wellbeing is immense. I have told you that forty percent of Nobel Prizes go to Jews. That is simply out of all proportion - forty percent to the small group of Jews, and sixty percent to the rest of the world. Naturally they have more intelligence, you cannot doubt it; it is a fact. And they have this idea that they are so intelligent because of circumcision, and they provide philosophical, logical, scientific proofs for it.

And one never knows, they may be right - because now many governments of the world are getting ready to pass resolutions that every child born in hospitals should be circumcised. It doesn’t matter whether he is Jew or Hindu or Christian or Mohammedan, that is not a question; it is a question of hygiene. It is certainly hygienic.